The aquarium staff at the Virginia Living Museum makes a concerted effort to lend our time and resources to conservation projects on site and in the field. On April 25, fellow aquarist Patrycja Lawryniuk and I got the opportunity to work on the Idaho Reef…
As part of our mission to conserve native wildlife, the VLM staff donates time and effort to many field projects in addition to our efforts at the museum. The most recent conservation project we are involved with is run by Amanda Guthrie, DVM for the…
Last year, Nick Little – a former VLM colleague, now a keeper at the National Zoo – and I went in search of the elusive candy darter Etheostoma osburni, an exceptionally beautiful fish. Darters are reclusive by nature and finding them at all is the main…
In the early summer of 2014 the Virginia Living Museum continued our census of the basking turtles in the lake. We chose three dates during the summer to conduct this project. As we did in previous seasons, students learned about turtle identification, biology, behavior and…
Tripletails Lobotes surinamensis are unusual fish but are even more unusual to find in our area; they are occasional late summer visitors to Virginia waters. They are more common further south particularly in the Gulf states where they hang around structure either inshore (pilings, bridges) or…
We recently put four lined seahorses onto exhibit that were bred on-site at the VLM. Aside from simply raising them to adulthood – which is a task in itself – we also “train” them to feed in a particular location. This is a process that…
These two day old seahorses are just a few from our latest cohort of juvenile lined seahorses Hippocampus erectus. These youngsters require constant attention and therefore have a small tank all to their own. We currently have three separate systems – one for breeding adults,…
Sturgeon are ancient creatures, first showing up in the fossil record nearly 200 million years ago. The current Family Acipenseridae, that contains the only two Virginia species of the 23 species, the Atlantic sturgeon A. oxyrhynchus and the shortnose sturgeon A. brevirostrum, has been around…
The juvenile loggerhead we acquired in October from NC Aquariums is now on exhibit in our Chesapeake Bay Aquarium. The time between his acquisition and his exhibit debut on December 26th was well spent getting him (there actually is no way to tell the gender…
One of the more interesting aspects of our Cypress Swamp habitarium is the variety of species; from the American alligator and several turtle species to over a dozen fish species. But that’s just in the water. The two-story glassed-in replica of a Virginia swamp also…